Takashi Miike
Takashi Miike (三池 崇史 Miike Takashi?, born August 24, 1960, Yao, Osaka, Japan) is a highly prolific and controversial Japanese filmmaker. He has directed over ninety theatrical, video, and television productions since his debut in 1991. Miike is credited with directing fifteen productions in the years 2001 and 2002 alone. His films range from violent and bizarre to dramatic and family-friendly. Miike's first films were television productions, but he also began directing several direct-to-video V-Cinema releases. Miike still directs V-Cinema productions intermittently due to the creative freedom afforded by the less stringent censorship of the medium and the riskier content that the producers will allow. Miike's theatrical debut was the film The Third Gangster (Daisan no gokudō). However it was Shinjuku Triad Society (1995) that was the first of his theatrical releases to gain public attention. The film showcased his extreme style and his recurring themes, and its success gave him the freedom to work on higher-budgeted pictures. Shinjuku Triad Society is also the first film in what is labeled his "Black Society Trilogy", which also includes Rainy Dog (1997) and Ley Lines (1999). He gained international fame in 2000 when his romantic horror film Audition (1999), his violent yakuza epic Dead or Alive (1999), and his controversial adaptation of the manga Ichi the Killer played at international film festivals. He has since gained a strong cult following in the West that is growing with the increase in DVD releases of his works. His film Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai premiered In Competition at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival. His 2013 film Straw Shield was nominated for the Palme d'Or at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival. Miike has garnered international notoriety for depicting shocking scenes of extreme violence and sexual perversions. Many of his films contain graphic and lurid bloodshed, often portrayed in an over-the-top, cartoonish manner. Much of his work depicts the activities of criminals (especially yakuza) or concern themselves with gaijin, non-Japanese or foreigners living in Japan. He is known for his dark sense of humor and for pushing the boundaries of censorship as far as they will go. Despite his notorious reputation, Miike has also directed movies in a range of genres. He has created lighthearted children's films (Zebraman and The Great Yokai War), period pieces (Sabu), subdued pictures such as the road movie The Bird People in China, a teen drama (Andoromedeia), a farcical musical-comedy-horror in The Happiness of the Katakuris, and even a video game adaptation in Ace Attorney. Other less controversial works include Ley Lines and Agitator, which are character-driven crime dramas. While Miike often creates films that are less accessible and target arthouse audiences and fans of extreme cinema, such as Izo and the "Box" segment in Three... Extremes, he has created several mainstream and commercial titles such as the horror film One Missed Call and the fantasy drama The Great Yokai War. Miike says that Starship Troopers is his favorite movie. He admires film directors Akira Kurosawa, Hideo Gosha, David Lynch, David Cronenberg, and Paul Verhoeven. One of his most controversial films was the ultra-violent Ichi the Killer (2001), adapted from a manga of the same name and starring Tadanobu Asano as a sadomasochistic yakuza enforcer. The extreme violence was initially exploited to promote the film: during its international premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2001, the audience received "barf bags" emblazoned with the film's logo as a promotional gimmick (one typically flamboyant gory killing involves a character slicing a man in half from head to groin, and severing another's face, which then slides down a nearby wall). However, the British Board of Film Classification refused to allow the release of the film uncut in Britain, citing its extreme levels of sexual violence towards women. In Hong Kong, 15 minutes of footage were cut. In the United States it has been shown uncut (unrated). An uncut DVD was also released in the Benelux. Category:Actors from Japan